For New York's newest, the dream still lives.
Immigration Today
UNLIGHT STREAMING through high windows at Kennedy Airport's new
immigration arrival hall reminds me-for an instant-of the light-filled
Registry Room at Ellis Island, where for decades new immigrants to New
York City were processed. Here also at Kennedy weary foreigners, docu
ments in hand, line up for inspection by the United States Immigration
and Naturalization Service (INS).
But for today's immigrant-prescreened and approved by a U. S. embassy or
consulate in his or her homeland-entry is streamlined. In minutes an INS inspector
confirms that papers are in order and directs the new immigrant to a glass-walled
room. There the newcomer's face is photographed at an angle-right earlobe
showing, please. (It's an identifying feature.) A print of the right index finger is
taken, and the person's signature recorded.
These three identifiers will be printed on a computer-generated, pink-colored,
blue-bordered, forgery-proof permanent
alien registration card. Still popularly
known as a green card, after the kind once
used, it is a work permit and proof of legal
entry, and it entitles the bearer to perma
nent residence and, should he so decide, to
apply for citizenship after five years.
Each week as many as 2,500 immi
grants arrive at Kennedy terminals. And
close to 100,000 newcomers-whether
coming by air, ship, or car-claim New
York as their final destination each year.
That's a sixth of all legal immigrants
some 600,000-that come annually to the
United States. The flow is higher than in
any decade since 1900-1910.
These new immigrants come for the
same reasons that brought their Ellis
PAMSPAULDING(ABOVEANDOPPOSITE)
Island predecessors--for opportunity, to Soviet Jewish refugees are admitted to the
escape oppression, to provide a better life United States at Kennedy Airport; bearers
United States at Kennedy Airport; bearers
for themselves and their children. But of altered and counterfeit documents
they come from other parts of the world, (above) were rejected.
with different racial and cultural back
grounds. Whereas Ellis Island welcomed primarily Europeans, Kennedy receives its
newcomers mainly from Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America.
The Dominican Republic heads the list, with 18,000 entrants in 1988, followed by
Jamaica, China, Haiti, and Guyana. Completing the top ten: India, South Korea,
Colombia, the Philippines, Ecuador. Another 150 countries send from two to 2,000
immigrants each, making New York the globe in microcosm.
How did it happen, this change in the origin of immigrants? Europeans had been
favored since 1924, when Congress in the Johnson-Reed Act set quotas based on the
percentage of a nationality in the U. S. population. During the 1950s that system
Immigration Today